Surviving the White Gaze

by Rebecca Carroll

  “Well,” I said, “I think being black and exploring my racial identity has been challenging. But it’s what I write about now, and I’m committed to helping and mentoring other black girls who might be struggling with their identity.”

  * * *

  I hadn’t actually read Tess’s book, but Caryn had.

  “Girl, this woman hurt my feelings. And I don’t even know her. Rebecca, girl. Whew,” Caryn said, truly anguished as she padded her slippered feet into the kitchen, shaking her head the whole way, the gorgeous round globe of her natural crop cut slowly swaying left to right.

  I knew that if I personally read whatever sequence of words was laid out in the pages of Tess’s book, it would be my undoing. As long as I didn’t read it, I thought, I would be safe from utter collapse.

  * * *

  During our Good Morning America spot, I felt oddly at ease, enjoying myself and giving what felt like smart answers to questions about navigating and creating a racial identity both as an interracial adoptee and in America at large. After the interview, I basked in the glow as then host Joan Lunden and her producers lauded me as “a natural” on air, although I knew that Tess was watching me, so I tried not to enjoy it too much.

  Ever an apostle of celebrity lore and the New York City literary cabal, Tess took us for lunch at Elaine’s after our Good Morning America segment. Over escargot, salads, and seltzer, Tess said, “You know, I noticed something today.” I fully expected her to say that I’d hogged airtime or attention, like she had when I visited her at the safe house for black girls where she’d volunteered the prior summer. The girls and I had naturally gravitated toward one another, but when Tess and I got home that night, she reprimanded me for taking over her domain. Instead, at a round table set against a wall lined with framed photographs of Elaine’s beloved regulars, authors and actors, Tess said, “I heard you refer to yourself as black.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Because I am.

  “Listen,” she said. “You came out of my body and I am white, so there’s no way that you’re gonna just go around calling yourself black.”

  The sheer arrogance of her assumption that only she could grant the permission required for me to call myself black was eviscerating, and her overt contempt toward even the idea of me claiming my blackness felt like a dam had broken.

  Turns out, I didn’t need to read even one word of Tess’s book to give way to collapse. Caryn came home from work that night to find me sitting on the stairway up to our bedrooms, in the dark. I’d been counting backward from fifty, thinking every time that when I got to one, I’d find a way to kill myself and do it—a razor to the wrist, downing a whole bottle of aspirin (would that even work?), maybe drink a gallon of drain cleaner (wasn’t that what killed one of the Heathers in the movie Heathers?). I’d gone through this countdown three times by the time Caryn got home.

  “Rebecca,” Caryn said, sitting down next to me on the step below. “What is going on?”

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” I said, as if what I meant by “this” would be obvious to her.

  “Honey, what are you talking about?”

  “Tess and this book, and my life, and I just feel so tired, and so dead and done.”

  “Rebecca,” Caryn said, holding my hands in hers, forcing me to look at her and focus on what she was saying. “You have too much to do in this world to give up now. Too many books to write, children to love, and people to inspire. You need to get some help, honey.”

  “Help like what?” I asked because I truly did not know.

  “Like a therapist, honey, someone to help you work through all of this.”

  * * *

  Pre-Google, pre-internet, Caryn offered to poll her network of folks in the nonprofit education community to see if anyone had recommendations, and came back with a list of about three names. The first and last woman I went to, from Caryn’s list, was young and pleasant, white with brown hair and glasses. She asked me a series of questions: Any recent or abrupt changes, jarring events in my life, weight gain, trouble sleeping? Check, check, check, and check. I gave her a brief history of my relationship with Tess, how it had led to her book, what she’d said recently at Elaine’s, and how Caryn had encouraged me to talk with someone.

  When I paused to take a breath, acutely aware that I was able to take a breath, the therapist removed her glasses and said, “Your friend did the right thing by telling you to come.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to harness this strange, ethereal sense of hope. “I think she might have actually saved my life.” Without my even touching on my parents, or the idea of something sexually inappropriate happening to me as a child, the therapist diagnosed me with clinical depression on the spot, and wrote me a prescription for the antidepressant Zoloft.

  * * *

  Within two weeks of starting to take Zoloft, I felt like a superwoman. I immediately lost ten pounds, laughed out loud for the first time in months, and felt for the first time in my entire life like I could, and would, stand up to Tess and tell her how toxic our relationship had been for me.

  When she called to tell me that we’d have even more to celebrate now because Hallmark wanted to make a TV movie out of her book, I said, “Absolutely fucking not.” I’d done everything I said I would do to support her book. It was over for me.

  Forty-Nine

  Feeling newly emancipated from Tess, I was thrilled when Skip Gates invited me to return to the Department of Afro-American Studies, not as a receptionist but as a W. E. B. Du Bois scholar for a yearlong fellowship with an office at Harvard to use as my home base while I traveled around the country to interview black girls for my book. The appointment coincided with a small grant awarded to me by the Kellogg Foundation, to be paid out through Harvard, but it wouldn’t come through for a month or more. I moved back to Boston and in with Monique, who had broken up with Marco and was working at a corporate law firm and living alone in an apartment in Jamaica Plain.

  It was hard to leave New York and Caryn, who stayed on in our house on Lefferts Avenue, but I knew I’d be back, that I was meant for Brooklyn, and it for me—a bastion of rugged, urban beauty and brown faces, trees fighting to grow in the cracks of concrete, the maddening subways and the sound of bass beats blaring from cars and open windows. I was glad, though, to say goodbye to Elle, where the most valuable lesson I learned came from Jada Pinkett, who answered my question about the difference between an interview in Elle versus Essence like this: “Elle feels necessary for the game, and Essence feels necessary for the family.”

  I planned to find my own place, but for the time being, Monique and I shared a bed in her one-bedroom apartment, and not long after I’d settled in, we were both startled awake in the middle of the night by a loud outcry: “I know who it was!”

  I didn’t even realize it was my own voice until we were both sitting upright.

  “What is it?” Monique said, shaken, clutching my arm where she sensed it was, as our eyes adjusted to the dark.

  “It was John, Monique,” I told her, calmly and with stunning clarity. “It was John, not my dad. I just saw it in a dream, but it wasn’t a dream.”

  “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  “In the dream, I am a child sitting on John’s lap, and his huge hands are all over me. On my arms, in between my legs, on my chest, squeezing my thighs. Then the dream flips to his point of view, and I’m an adult,” I said, describing to Monique something I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized before. “And then the point of view flips back to mine, and I see those beady eyes, like, pulsating, and that sick, perverted smile.”

  * * *

  Right after I moved back to Boston, a couple of weeks before the dream, I did a reading and book signing at a bookstore in New Hampshire owned by friends of the family. I was newly empowered—that is, medicated—feeling almost insanely sane and hyperlucid as I greeted people and signed copies of my books. This, I thought, was what it must feel like to be on cocaine. Everything was grand! I
finished signing one book, marking a period at the end of my name with the exaggerated flare of an author, handing it back with a grateful smile. The customer smiled back, and peeled off to make room for the next person in line.

  He was taller than I remembered, but those beady eyes were unmistakable. John’s shoulders were hunched with his hands drawn to his chest, carrying not a book but something else, small enough to fit inside cupped hands. All the people and sounds and books around us faded, and all the adrenaline I’d been riding high on just minutes before evaporated so completely that I felt emotionally dehydrated. His tight, wide grin bore into me like a scythe as he moved closer to the signing table and opened his hands in front of me, to reveal a tattered stub of rust-colored macramé, with one greenish-brown ceramic bead tied to the end.

  “Remember when you made this for me?” he said, his mouth stuck in a crude grin, like the Joker’s. “You were just a little girl, my wifey, remember?”

  I tried to do something with my mouth, make words or fake a smile, but nothing came, and I just sat there, simultaneously disoriented and grounded in what felt like near-dry cement but somehow worse.

  “Excuse me, sir?” the woman behind him in line said kindly. “Are you going to have a book signed?”

  John moved to the side, and then sank back into the crowd. Suddenly I was signing books again, as if the whole exchange had been intercut in the room’s collective imagination. I didn’t see him again that night, and didn’t think of him again until the dream at Monique’s.

  The revelation of John’s sexual misconduct with me as a child was sound and certain, and it was enough. I had no interest in confronting him, although I did tell Mom, who said she had thought John was rather odd, and that this didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.

  I decided to put it behind me. I couldn’t take on more trauma after pushing through the last of my relationship with Tess. Instead, I dove into my work on the book.

  Fifty

  One of my stops for Sugar in the Raw was at the Boys and Girls Club in Burlington, Vermont, where I presented the project, as I did in all the cities, schools, centers, and organizations I visited, and invited girls in the audience to come talk with me after if they were interested in being interviewed for the book. I wanted the book to present as broad a range as possible of black girls growing up in America, and if I had existed in super white, rural New Hampshire, there had to be other black girls in similar New England settings. Nicole, a fierce and funny seventeen-year-old biracial girl who was not at all ambivalent about calling herself black, volunteered her story, and it ended up being one of the best interviews in the book.

  After two years in South America, Ryan returned to the States, and landed in Burlington. When I mapped out my travel for Sugar in the Raw, I included Burlington certainly for the reason of wanting a rural New England perspective, but also because I knew Ryan was there. We’d exchanged a few letters while he was out of the country, and the tenor between us was easy and forgiving.

  We met up in Burlington after my interview with Nicole, then shopped for ingredients to make tacos back at his house, where we drank wine and chopped onions and tomatoes, grated cheese and danced around the kitchen like an old married couple. He was living in a small, rustic cottage just off the busy part of Burlington, with a few plants on a mostly empty bookshelf, issues of Outside magazine strewn about, and a thick, round wood table with mismatched chairs in the kitchen. It smelled like sautéed jalapeños and onions, steamed brown rice and summer, as we laughed and remembered each other, marveled over the fifteen difficult and impulsive years we’d known each other, how we’d both changed and hadn’t.

  My hair, which I’d been wearing in a shorn afro dyed strawberry blonde for book appearances, both mine and Tess’s, was newly straightened, in a pixie-like style inspired by Halle Berry’s look at the time, the mid-’90s. I wasn’t quite as thin as I was when Ryan told me that my being skinny was “maybe” one of the reasons he found me attractive in college and not in high school, but I was still quite thin, after losing weight as a side effect of Zoloft.

  When Ryan ran his hands up around my bare thighs, slid them under the size-four tulip-cut miniskirt that I remember feeling proud to fit into, and said, “You’re so beautiful,” I wanted to be his kind of beautiful forever. In retrospect, this was one of those moments when Whoopi Goldberg’s character from Ghost would have said to me, “You in danger, girl!” Because of course it was a setup. We spent forty-eight hours of bliss together, during which we decided we would give our fickle relationship another try, and that he would join me for the next leg of my travel for the book.

  In the morning we agreed I would leave ahead of him, and he would meet me the following week, but he changed his mind about everything.

  “You can’t broker a relationship,” Ryan said over the phone after I’d gotten back to Boston, turning the blame on me for luring him from Berkeley three years before. The hell I can’t, I thought to myself. My entire existence—the adoption, the reunion, the construct of race, the co-option of my identity, the fucking foundation of America—had all been the result of a brokered relationship, with white people as the brokers and black bodies as the raw commodity. Fuck you, Ryan.

  He was right, though. I was in survivor mode and I knew it. Years of negotiating Tess’s aggressively calculating behavior while simultaneously processing Mom and Dad’s passively unaffected attitudes had made me terse, argumentative, and cynical. I put up an abrasive guard that pushed back with fury and desperation, while also reaching for what?—I didn’t even know for sure at that point.

  Three months later Ryan called to tell me he was getting married.

  “Just curious,” I said. “What’s she look like?” Even though I knew the answer.

  “I mean, she’s blonde, really athletic, blue eyes,” he said. “Why? What does that have to do with anything?”

  * * *

  That fall, I started a teaching job at an all-girls private school outside of Boston. After spending the summer talking with young black girls across the country, I was drawn to the idea of teaching high-school-age girls, particularly black girls who found themselves in predominantly white spaces. Between my eleventh grade history class and my ninth grade English class, I had about a half dozen black students.

  The fall of 1995 gave us the Million Man March to discuss and the O. J. Simpson trial to watch and debate over in my history class, while I introduced my ninth graders to The Bluest Eye and essays by Toni Cade Bambara. Less than a month into the school year, white parents complained to the administration that I was pushing a “black agenda” on their children, while black parents wrote me personal notes thanking me for being such a powerful role model for their daughters. I spent hours on my curriculum and syllabus, pored over readings, and corrected essays and exams, channeling Elijah as I wrote careful notes in the margins. He was still the best teacher I’d ever had.

  A core group of the girls, both black and white, spent nearly every free moment they had in my classroom gathered around my desk in youthful disarray, sometimes to talk about a writing assignment or the latest episode of 90210, other times to vent about their homework or teachers from other classes. The only other black teacher at the school taught art, and was, I soon discovered, not at all interested in disrupting the status quo. It felt like I was called into the headmistress’s office at least once a week to discuss protocol, boundaries, the materials I was teaching, and the discussions I was fostering among my students.

  It all sounded very familiar to Dad, who told me he’d experienced the same kind of criticism and reprimand when he was a high school teacher, pushing against the system and advocating for his students. The difference, though, was that I was fighting not just the academic system but a white supremacist system as well, which didn’t occur to Dad and marked another moment, like the conversation we’d had about him not having any black friends, when it was acutely clear he didn’t think about race at all.

  Fifty-One<
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  “I don’t understand why you’re so mad about Spike Lee directing this Michael Jackson video,” Mom said, genuinely perplexed.

  “Because Spike is like the Black Man,” I said, fuming. “He preaches this whole thing about authenticity and walking the walk as a black man, and bringing it back to the community.” Mom tilted her head, trying to follow along with what I was saying. “Michael Jackson’s descent into assimilated white social behavior is just the sort of bullshit that Spike criticizes.”

  “Well, Beck, that’s very interesting.”

  And I believe that Mom did think it was interesting, in the same way that Masterpiece Theatre and the fashion in Vogue magazine were interesting.

  “You seem tense, though. It seems like this whole teaching thing has stripped you of your sense of peace in some ways,” she said. “It’s like it’s incited this rage for social causes that I’ve never seen in you before.”

  I tended not to push Mom after she reached this point in a conversation, when she’d make a sort of sweeping, preemptive statement that stealthily dipped into her reserve of incontestable knowledge that she held about her children, stored from the fifteen years, give or take, that she’d spent focused solely on our well-being.

  Still, the notion that maintaining a sense of peace meant not being angry about “social issues,” i.e., race, was both preposterous and offensive. I knew, though, that trying to help her understand why it was preposterous and offensive would yield unsatisfying results, with her only getting increasingly defensive and upset, and nobody better or smarter for it. And in any event, her comment had evoked a different source of rage in me.